Consumer Law & Policy Blog

U.S. News Article on Rebates

U.S. News and World Reports has an article on rebates, titled "Why Shoppers Love to Hate Rebates" that gives both sides of the debate.  A self-serving excerpt:

Jim Wohlever, chief executive at Young America, explains that companies could not afford to offer as many rebates if everyone took advantage of them. Requiring effort on the part of customers separates those who will make a purchase only if they can get the refund from those who are willing to pay more. Plus, it allows retailers to maximize their profits by selling to both groups at different prices. "It's a price segmentation strategy," Wohlever says.

Or it may just be a paperwork-tolerance segmentation strategy. "It may only separate those who can better fill out forms from those who can't, or those who have more time to complete forms from those who don't," says Sovern, who questions the fairness of rebates.

Social Security Moving to Debit Cards

Over at Credit Slips, Adam Levitin has this excellent post on the Social Security Administration's decision to begin to distribute some social security benefits in the form of debit cards rather than by traditional check. The move has the potential to save recipients money, but it also has the potential to hurt recipients if the private entities that issue the cards (or the merchants that accept them) charge fees.

Presidential candidates on toy safety

Carey Greenberg-Berger at the Consumerist followed up my digging into presidential candidates' participation in consumer legislation with some more digging, and looked into the candidates' rhetoric on toy safety, one of the "hot" consumer issues of 2007.

The Democrat front-runners gave the matter lip service, advocating better testing, more funding for the CPSC, and border controls. The Republican candidates largely sidestepped the issue, giving a lip service acknowledgment of the problem, at best.

In sum, if you want a president who cares about consumer issues, you are probably better voting for a Democrat and keeping your expectations low.

Presidential candidates' votes on 2007 consumer legislation

First, happy New Year and thanks to Deepak for inviting me to take part in the Consumer Law & Policy blog! I am a consumer rights attorney in Minneapolis, Minnesota, and I publish a blog of my own, Caveat Emptor. I have also guest blogged at Consumerist a few times. I look forward to contributing here at CL&P Blog.

Yesterday's post on 2007 consumer legislation inspired me to poke around in the Congressional Record to see how the 2008 presidential candidates--the current legislators, anyway--stood on the consumer legislation Consumerist identified (Open Document Format spreadsheet). After spending about an hour figuring out how the candidates voted, my research shows that none of the candidates seem to care very much about consumer issues.

Dennis Kucinich co-sponsored the Arbitration Fairness Act and the College Cost Reduction and Access Act. John McCain co-sponsored the Internet Tax Freedom Act. Barack Obama co-sponsored the Industrial Bank Holding Company Act (whatever that is). And Hillary Clinton co-sponsored the Do-Not-Call Improvement Act. If co-sponsoring is an expression of a legislator's interest in and desire to be identified with a particular piece of legislation, then this is a pretty disinterested showing, although Kucinich does seem to have a passing interest.

Only the College Cost Reduction and Access Act actually got a roll-call vote in both chambers, and the candidates apparently voted the party line, assuming Democrats favored the act and the Republicans opposed it.

So, based on the candidates' voting history in 2007, it does not look like consumers have much reason to think any of the current legislators will pay much attention to consumer issues if elected. Although perhaps even that would be an improvement over the current climate.

A Look Back at the Year 2007 in Federal Consumer Protection Legislation

Just in time for New Year's Eve, the folks at The Consumerist have compiled a handy list of significant federal consumer-protection legislation that was introduced in the year 2007. Of the 7,440 bills introduced this year, the editors identified less than 15 as "consumer friendly." And most of the bills are still pending, which means there's a lot of work to do in 2008.

Dutch Government Mandates Open Source Software

A new Dutch law will require that Dutch government agencies use open source software - -  non-proprietary programs that anyone can modify and that work with a variety of technology - - unless proprietary software is necessary to accomplish their objectives.  As you might imagine, Microsoft thinks the Dutch law is a bad idea.  Read about it here.

Halliburton Victim Twice Over

by Angela Canterbury (advocacy director for Public Citizen's Congress Watch)
posted yesterday on The Hill's Congress Blog

Today, Jamie Leigh Jones will appear before the House Judiciary Committee and tell how she was gang raped by her co-workers in Iraq while working for a Halliburton subsidiary called KBR. Afterwards, her assaulters confined her to a shipping container and warned that if she left Iraq for medical treatment, she’d be fired. That’s where she was found by agents sent by the U.S. embassy to rescue her — after her father called their congressman, Representative Ted Poe (R-Texas).

Now, Jamie Leigh Jones has been victimized twice over. Because KBR/Halliburton requires employees to sign contracts containing a binding mandatory arbitration (BMA) in the fine print, Jones is being denied her constitutional right to bring her perpetrators before a jury and be heard.

But Jamie Leigh Jones will be heard by Congress today — and then, lawmakers should waste no time in re-opening the doors of justice for Jones and the rest of us. It’s time to ban binding mandatory arbitration in employment and consumer contracts once and for all. There may be no other device being used today by Halliburton and other corporate giants that does more to systematically deny rights to workers and consumers.

Congress has begun to focus. Last Wednesday, the Senate Judiciary Subcommittee on the Constitution held a hearing on the Arbitration Fairness Act — a bill that would ban most forms of binding mandatory arbitration introduced in the House by Rep. Hank Johnson (D-Ga.) and in the Senate by Sen. Russ Feingold (D-Wis.).

Senator Brownback called it a “where the rubber meets the road hearing.” He could not have been more right. While witnesses for the bill showed real-world harms from the system of biased, privatized justice that many companies force on their customers and employees, opponents offered scarecrow arguments crafted with cherry-picked data from out-dated studies. Still, it was impossible to ignore at least one hard fact: binding mandatory arbitration ruins lives.

BMA Proponents: Consumers Don't Know What's Good For Them; the Businesses That Write the Contracts Do

by Richard Alderman

  Last Wednesday, I testified before the Senate Judiciary Committee regarding the Arbitration Fairness Act of 2007. In simple terms, the bill prohibits pre-dispute arbitration in employment and consumer contracts.  Paul Bland also testified and did a great job. Here is his testimony.

In my testimony,  I discussed the "big-picture" effect of eliminating the courts from consumer disputes. My argument was similar to the one in my recent article, The Future of Consumer Law in the United States - Hello Arbitration, Bye-Bye Courts, So-Long Consumer Protection.  I thought it went well.  Even Senator Brownback, who stated his opposition to the bill, noted that I raised an interesting point that he would have to think about.

What surprised me, however, was the approach of those opposing the bill.  All of those testifying in opposition, mostly employees of arbitration associations and big law firms that defend arbitration of disputes, echoed the same sentiment: "We can't eliminate pre-dispute arbitration because forcing consumers to arbitrate is in their best interest." I heard statistic after statistic about how much more money consumers receive and how much quicker they receive it, in arbitration. Listening to this testimony, you would have thought I was hired by big business to testify, and the others were doing the Lord's work helping consumers.  I began to question whether I should have even been testifying in support of the bill. Was I anti-consumer?

Senate Judiciary Committee Hearing on the Arbitration Fairness Act

Right now, the Senate Judiciary Committee is holding an important hearing on the Arbitration Fairness Act -- legislation that would ban mandatory, binding arbitration clauses in consumer and employment agreements. (Click here to watch a live webcast of the hearing).  The witnesses include CL&P bloggers and arbitration experts Paul Bland and Richard M. Alderman and as well as Mark A. de Bernardo (a management-side employment lawyer at union-buster Jackson Lewis); Richard Naimark of the American Arbitration Association; pro-mandatory-binding-arbitration professor Peter Rutledge of Catholic University and Tanya Solov of the Illinois Secretary of State's Securities Department.  Our previous coverage of the Arbitration Fairness Act, and the battle over mandatory binding arbitration more generally, is available here.

How The Subprime Mortgage Implosion Has Hit One Area

This detailed, fact-intensive article in today's Washington Post describes how home foreclosures have risen sharply in recent months in the D.C. metropolitan area.